The Procession of Life

LIFE FIGURES
itself
to me as a festal or funereal
procession. All of us have our places, and are to
move onward under the direction of a
Chief-Marshal. The grand difficulty results from
the invariably mistaken principles on which the
deputy-marshals seek to arrange this immense
concourse of people, so much more numerous than
those that train their interminable length through
streets and highways in times of political
excitement. Their scheme is ancient, far beyond
the memory of man, or even the record of history,
and has hitherto been very little modified by the
innate sense of something wrong, and the dim
perception of better methods, that have disquieted
all the ages through which the procession has
taken its march. Its members are classified by
the merest external circumstances, and thus are
more certain to be thrown out of their true
positions, than if no principle of arrangement
were attempted. In one part of the procession we
see men of landed estate or moneyed capital,
gravely keeping each other company, for the
preposterous reason that they chance to have a
similar standing in the tax-gatherer's book.
Trades and professions march together with
scarcely a more real bond of union. In this
manner, it cannot be denied, people are
disentangled from
the mass, and separated into various classes
according to certain apparent relations; all have
some artificial badge, which the world, and
themselves among the first, learn to consider as a
genuine characteristic. Fixing our attention on
such outside shows of similarity or difference,
lose sight of those realities by which nature,
fortune, fate, or Providence, has constituted for
every man a brotherhood, wherein it is one great
office of human wisdom to classify him. When the
mind has once accustomed itself to a proper
arrangement of the Procession of Life, or a true
classification of society, even though merely
speculative, there is thenceforth a satisfaction
which pretty well suffices for itself, without the
aid of any actual reformation in the order of
march.

For instance,
assuming to myself the power of
marshalling the aforesaid procession, I direct a
trumpeter to send forth a blast loud enough to be
heard from hence to China; and a herald, with
world-pervading voice, to make proclamation for a
certain class of mortals to take their places.
What shall be their principle of union? After
all, an external one, in comparison with many that
might be found, yet far more real than those which
the world has selected for a similar purpose. Let
all who are afflicted with like physical diseases
form themselves into ranks!

Our first
attempt at classification is not very
successful. It may gratify the pride of
aristocracy to reflect, that Disease, more than
any other circumstance of human life, pays due
observance to the distinctions which rank and
wealth, and poverty and lowliness, have
established among mankind. Some maladies are rich
and precious, and only to be acquired by the right
of inheritance, or purchased with gold. Of this
kind is the gout, which serves as a bond of
brotherhood to the purple-visaged gentry, who obey
the herald's voice, and painfully hobble from all
civilized regions of the globe to take their post
in the grand procession. In mercy to their toes,
let us hope that the march may not be long! The
Dyspeptics, too, are people of good standing in
the world. For them the earliest salmon is caught
in our eastern rivers, and the shy woodcock stains
the dry leaves with his blood, in his remotest
haunts; and the turtle comes from the far Pacific
islands to be gobbled up in soup. They can afford
to flavor all their dishes with indolence, which,
in spite of the general opinion, is a sauce more
exquisitely piquant than appetite won by exercise.
Apoplexy is another highly respectable disease.
We will rank together all who have the symptom of
dizziness in the brain, and, as fast as any drop
by the way, supply their places with new members
of the board of aldermen.

On the
other hand, here come whole tribes of
people, whose physical lives are but a
deteriorated variety of life, and themselves a
meaner species of mankind; so sad an effect has
been wrought by the tainted breath of cities,
scanty and unwholesome food, destructive modes of
labor, and the lack of those moral supports that
might partially have counteracted such bad
influences. Behold here a train of
house-painters, all afflicted with a peculiar sort
of colic. Next in place we will marshal those
workmen in cutlery, who have breathed a fatal
disorder into their lungs, with the impalpable
dust of steel. Tailors and shoemakers, being
sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one
part of the procession, and march under similar
banners of disease; but among them we may observe
here and there a sickly student, who has left his
health between the leaves of classic volumes; and
clerks, likewise, who have caught their deaths on
high official stools; and men of genius, too, who
have written sheet after sheet, with pens dipped
in their heart's blood. These are a wretched,
quaking, short-breathed set. But what is this
crowd of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb
the ear with the multiplicity of their short, dry
coughs? They are seamstresses, who have plied the
daily and nightly needle in the service of
master-tailors and close-fisted contractors, until
now it is almost time for each to hem the borders
of her own shroud. Consumption points their place
in the procession. With their sad sisterhood are
intermingled many youthful maidens, who have
sickened in aristocratic mansions, and for whose
aid science has unavailingly searched its
volumes, and whom breathless love has watched. In
our ranks the rich maiden and the poor seamstress
may walk arm in arm. We might find innumerable
other instances, where the bond of mutual
disease--not to speak of nation-sweeping
pestilences--embraces high and low, and makes the
king a brother of the clown. But it is not hard
to own that Disease is the natural aristocrat.
Let him keep his state, and have his established
orders of rank, and wear his royal mantle of the
color of a fever-flush; and let the noble and
wealthy boast their own physical infirmities, and
display their symptoms as the badges of high
station! All things considered, these are as
proper subjects of human pride as any relations of
human rank that men can fix upon.

Sound again,
thou deep-breathed trumpeter! and
herald, with thy voice of might, shout forth
another summons, that shall reach the old baronial
castles of Europe, and the rudest cabin of our
western wilderness! What class is next to take
its place in the procession of mortal life? Let
it be those whom the gifts of intellect have
united in a noble brotherhood!

Aye, this
is a reality, before which the
conventional distinctions of society melt away,
like a vapor when we would grasp it with the hand.
Were Byron now alive, and Burns, the first would
come from his ancestral Abbey, flinging aside,
although unwillingly, the inherited honors of a
thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty
peasant, who grew immortal while he stooped behind
his plough. These are gone; but the hall, the
farmer's fireside, the hut, perhaps the palace,
the counting-room, the workshop, the village, the
city, life's high places and low ones, may all
produce their poets, whom a common temperament
pervades like an electric sympathy. Peer or
ploughman, we will muster them, pair by pair, and
shoulder to shoulder. Even society, in its most
artificial state, consents to this arrangement.
These factory girls from Lowell shall mate
themselves with the pride of drawing-rooms and
literary circles--the bluebells in fashion's
nose-gay, the Sapphos, and Montagues, and Nortons,
of the age. Other modes of intellect bring
together as strange companies. Silk-gowned
professor of languages, give your arm to this
sturdy blacksmith, and deem yourself honored by
the conjunction, though you behold him grimy from
the anvil. All varieties of human speech are like
his mother tongue to this rare man.
Indiscriminately, let those take their places, of
whatever rank they come, who possess the kingly
gifts to lead armies, or to sway a people,
Nature's generals, her lawgivers, her kings,--and
with them, also, the deep philosophers, who think
the thought in one generation that is to
revolutionize society in the next. With the
hereditary legislator, in whom eloquence is a
far-descended attainment--a rich echo repeated by
powerful voices, from Cicero downward--we will
match some wondrous backwoodsman, who has caught a
wild power of language from the breeze among his
native forest boughs. But we may safely leave
brethren and sisterhood to settle their own
congenialities. Our ordinary distinctions become
so trifling, so impalpable, so ridiculously
visionary, in comparison with a classification
founded on truth, that all talk about the matter
is immediately a common-place.

Yet, the
longer I reflect, the less am I satisfied
with the idea of forming a separate class of
mankind on the basis of high intellectual power.
At best, it is but a higher development of innate
gifts common to all. Perhaps, moreover, he, whose
genius appears deepest and truest, excels his
fellows in nothing save the knack of expression;
he throws out, occasionally, a lucky hint at
truths of which every human soul is profoundly,
though unutterably, conscious. Therefore, though
we suffer the brotherhood of intellect to march
onward together, it may be doubted whether their
peculiar relation will not begin to vanish, as
soon as the procession shall have passed beyond
the circle of this present world. But we do not
classify for eternity.

And next,
let the trumpet pour forth a funereal
wail, and the herald's voice give breath, in one
vast cry, to all the groans and grievous
utterances that are audible throughout the earth.
We appeal now to the sacred bond of sorrow, and
summon the great multitude who labor under similar
afflictions, to take their places in the march.

How many
a heart, that would have been insensible
to any other call, has responded to the doleful
accents of that voice! It has gone far and wide,
and high and low, and left scarcely a mortal roof
unvisited. Indeed, the principle is only too
universal for our purpose, and, unless we limit
it, will quite break up our classification of
mankind, and convert the whole procession into a
funeral train. We will therefore be at some pains
to discriminate. Here comes a lonely rich man; he
has built a noble fabric for his dwelling-house,
with a front of stately architecture, and marble
floors, and doors of precious woods; the whole
structure is as beautiful as a dream, and as
substantial as the native rock. But the visionary
shapes of a long posterity, for whose home this
mansion was intended, have faded into nothingness,
since the death of the founder's only son. The
rich man gives a glance at his sable garb in one
of the splendid mirrors of his drawing-room, and,
descending a flight of lofty steps, instinctively
offers his arm to yonder poverty-stricken widow,
in the rusty black bonnet, and with a check-apron
over her patched gown. The sailor boy, who was
her sole earthly stay, was washed overboard in a
late tempest. This couple, from the palace and
the almshouse, are but the types of thousands
more, who represent the dark tragedy of life, and
seldom quarrel for the upper parts. Grief is such
a leveller, with its own dignity and its own
humility, that the noble and the peasant, the
beggar and the monarch, will waive their
pretensions to external rank, without the
officiousness of interference on our part. If
pride--the influence of the world's false
distinctions--remain in the heart, then sorrow
lacks the earnestness which makes it holy and
reverend. It loses its reality, and becomes a
miserable shadow. On this ground, we have an
opportunity to assign over multitudes who would
willingly claim places here, to other parts of the
procession. If the mourner have anything dearer
than his grief, he must seek his true position
elsewhere. There are so many unsubstantial
sorrows, which the necessity of our mortal state
begets on idleness, that an observer, casting
aside sentiment, is sometimes led to question
whether there be any real woe, except absolute
physical suffering, and the loss of closest
friends. A crowd, who exhibit what they deem to
be broken hearts--and among them many love-lore
maids and bachelors, and men of disappointed
ambition in arts, or politics, and the poor who
were once rich, or who have sought to be rich in
vain--the great majority of these may ask
admittance into some other fraternity. There is
no room here. Perhaps we may institute a separate
class, where such unfortunates will naturally fall
into the procession. Meanwhile let them stand
aside, and patiently await their time.

If our
trumpeter can borrow a note from the
doomsday trumpet-blast, let him sound it now! The
dread alarum should make the earth quake to its
centre, for the herald is about to address mankind
with a summons, to which even the purest mortal
may be sensible of some faint responding echo in
his breast. In many bosoms it will awaken a
still, small voice, more terrible than its own
reverberating uproar.

The hideous
appeal has swept around the globe.
Come, all ye guilty ones, and rank yourselves in
accordance with the brotherhood of crime! This,
indeed, is an awful summons. I almost tremble to
look at the strange partnerships that begin to be
formed, reluctantly, but by the invincible
necessity of like to like, in this part of the
procession. A forger from the state prison seizes
the arm of a distinguished financier. How
indignantly does the latter plead his fair
reputation upon 'Change, and insist that his
operations, by their magnificence of scope, were
removed into quite another sphere of morality than
those of his pitiful companion! But, let him cut
the connection if he can. Here comes a murderer,
with his clanking chains, and pairs
himself--horrible to tell!--with as pure and
upright a man, in all observable respects, as ever
partook of the consecrated bread and wine. He is
one of those, perchance the most hopeless of all
sinners, who practice such an exemplary system of
outward duties, that even a deadly crime may be
hidden from their own sight and remembrance, under
this unreal frost-work. Yet he now finds his
place. Why do that pair of flaunting girls, with
the pert, affected laugh, and the sly leer at the
bystanders, intrude themselves into the same rank
with yonder decorous matron, and that somewhat
prudish maiden? Surely, these poor creatures, born
to vice, as their sole and natural inheritance,
can be no fit associates for women who have been
guarded round about by all the proprietries of
domestic life, and who could not err, unless they
first created the opportunity! Oh, no; it must be
merely the impertinence of those unblushing
hussies; and we can only wonder how such
respectable ladies should have responded to a
summons that was not meant for them.

We shall
make short work of this miserable class,
each member of which is entitled to grasp any
other member's
hand, by that vile degradation wherein guilty
error has buried all alike. The foul fiend, to
whom it properly belongs, must relieve us of our
loathsome task. Let the bond-servants of sin pass
on. But neither man nor woman, in whom good
predominates, will smile or sneer, nor bid the
Rogues' March be played, in derision of their
array. Feeling within their breasts a shuddering
sympathy, which at least gives token of the sin
that might have been, they will thank God for any
place in the grand procession of human existence,
save among those most wretched ones. Many,
however, will be astonished at the fatal impulse
that drags them thitherward. Nothing is more
remarkable than the various deceptions by which
guilt conceals itself from the perpetrator's
conscience, and oftenest, perhaps, by the splendor
of its garments. Statesmen, rulers, generals, and
all men who act over an extensive sphere, are most
liable to be deluded in this way; they commit
wrong, devastation, and murder, on so grand a
scale, that it impresses them as speculative
rather than actual; but, in our procession, we
find them linked in detestable conjunction with
the meanest criminals, whose deeds have the
vulgarity of petty details. Here, the effect of
circumstance and accident is done away, and a man
finds his rank according to the spirit of his
crime, in whatever shape it may have been
developed.

We have
called the Evil; now let us call the Good.
The trumpet's brazen throat should pour heavenly
music over the earth, and the herald's voice go
forth with the sweetness of an angel's accents, as
if to summon each upright man to his reward. But,
how is this? Do none answer to the call? Not
one: for the just, the pure, the true, and all who
might most worthily obey it, shrink sadly back, as
most conscious of error and imperfection. Then
let the summons be to those whose pervading
principle is Love. This classification will
embrace all the truly good, and none in whose
souls there exists not something that may expand
itself into a heaven, both of well-doing and
felicity.

The first
that presents himself is a man of
wealth, who has bequeathed the bulk of his
property to a hospital; his ghost, methinks, would
have a better right here than his living body.
But here they come, the genuine benefactors of
their race. Some have wandered about the earth,
with pictures of bliss in their imagination, and
with hearts that shrank sensitively from the idea
of pain and woe, yet have studied all varieties of
misery that human nature can endure. The prison,
the insane asylum, the squalid chambers of the
alms-house, the manufactory where the demon of
machinery annihilates the human soul, and the
cotton-field where God's image becomes a beast of
burthen; to these, and every other scene where man
wrongs or neglects his brother, the apostles of
humanity have penetrated. This missionary, black
with India's burning sunshine, shall give his arm
to a pale-faced brother who has made himself
familiar with the infected alleys and loathsome
haunts of vice, in one of our own cities. The
generous founder of a college shall be the partner
of a maiden lady, of narrow substance, one of
whose good deeds it has been, to gather a little
school of orphan children. If the mighty merchant
whose benefactions are reckoned by thousands of
dollars, deem himself worthy, let him join the
procession with her whose love has proved itself
by watchings at the sick-bed, and all those lowly
offices which bring her into actual contact with
disease and wretchedness. And with those whose
impulses have guided them to benevolent actions,
we will rank others, to whom Providence has
assigned a different tendency and different
powers. Men who have spent their lives in
generous and holy contemplation for the human
race; those who, by a certain heavenliness of
spirit, have purified the atmosphere around them,
and thus supplied a medium in which good and high
things may be projected and performed,--give to
these a lofty place among the benefactors of
mankind, although no deed, such as the world calls
deeds, may be recorded of them. There are some
individuals, of whom we cannot conceive it proper
that they should apply their hands to any earthly
instrument, or work out any definite act; and
others, perhaps not less high, to whom it is an
essential attribute to labor, in body as well as
spirit, for the welfare of their brethren. Thus,
if we find a spiritual sage, whose unseen,
inestimable influence has exalted the moral
standard of mankind, we will choose for his
companion some poor laborer, who has wrought for
love in the potatoe-field of a neighbor poorer
than himself.

We have
summoned this various mulitude--and, to
the credit of our nature, it is a large one--on
the principle of Love. It is singular,
nevertheless, to remark the shyness that exists
among many members of the present class, all of
whom we might expect to recognize one another by
the free-masonry of mutual goodness, and to
embrace like brethren, giving God thanks for such
various specimens of human excellence. But it is
far otherwise. Each sect surrounds its own
righteousness with a hedge of thorns. It is
difficult for the good Christian to acknowledge
the good Pagan; almost impossible for the good
Orthodox to grasp the hand of the good Unitarian,
leaving to their Creator to settle the matters in
dispute, and giving their mutual efforts strongly
and trustingly to whatever right thing is too
evident to be mistaken. Then again, though the
heart be large, yet the mind is often of such
moderate dimensions as to be exclusively filled up
with one idea. When a good man has long devoted
himself to a particular kind of beneficence--to
one species of reform--he is apt to become
narrowed into the limits of the path wherein he
treads, and to fancy that there is no other good
to be done on earth but that self-same good to
which he has put his hand, and in the very mode
that best suits his own concep tions. All else is
worthless; his scheme must be wrought out by the
united strength of the whole world's stock of
love, or the world is no longer worthy of a
position in the universe. Moreover, powerful
Truth, being the rich grape-juice expressed from
the vineyard of the ages, has an intoxicating
quality, when imbibed by any save a powerful
intellect, and often, as it were, impels the
quaffer to quarrel in his cups. For such reasons,
strange to say, it is harder to contrive a
friendly arrangement of these brethren of love and
righteousness, in the procession of life, than to
unite even the wicked, who, indeed, are chained
together by their crimes. The fact is too
preposterous for tears, too lugubrious for
laughter.

But, let
good men push and elbow one another as
they may, during their earthly march, all will be
peace among them when the honorable array of their
procession shall tread on heavenly ground. There
they will doubtless find, that they have been
working each for the other's cause, and that every
well-delivered stroke, which, with an honest
purpose, any mortal struck, even for a narrow
object, was indeed stricken for the universal
cause of good. Their own view may be bounded by
country, creed, profession, the diversities of
individual character--but above them all is the
breadth of Providence. How many, who have deemed
themselves antagonists, will smile hereafter, when
they look back upon the world's wide harvest
field, and perceive that, in unconscious
brotherhood, they were helping to bind the
self-same sheaf!

But, come!
The sun is hastening westward, while
the march of human life, that never paused before,
is delayed by our attempt to re-arrange its order.
It is desirable to find some comprehensive
principle, that shall render our task easier by
bringing thousands into the ranks, where hitherto
we have brought one. Therefore let the trumpet,
if possible, split its brazen throat with a louder
note than ever, and the herald summon all mortals
who, from whatever cause, have lost, or never
found, their proper places in the world.

Obedient to
this call, a great multitude come
together, most of them with a listless gait,
betokening weariness of soul, yet with a gleam of
satisfaction in their faces, at the prospect of at
length reaching those positions which, hitherto,
they have vainly sought. But here will be another
disappointment; for we can attempt no more than
merely to associate, in one fraternity, all who
are afflicted with the same vague trouble. Some
great mistake in life is the chief condition of
admittance into this class. Here are members of
the learned professions, whom Providence endowed
with special gifts for the plough, the forge, and
the wheel-barrow, or for the routine of
unintellectual business. We will assign to them,
as partners in the march, those lowly laborers and
handicraftsmen, who have pined, as with a dying
thirst, after the unattainable fountains of
knowledge. The latter have lost less than their
companions; yet more, because they deem it
infinite. Perchance the two species of
unfortunates may comfort one another. Here are
Quakers with the instinct of battle in them; and
men of war who should have worn the broadbrim.
Authors shall be ranked here, whom some freak of
Nature, making game of her poor children, has
imbued with the confidence of genius, and strong
desire of fame, but has favored with no
corresponding power; and others, whose lofty gifts
were unaccompanied with the faculty of expression,
or any of that earthly machinery, by which
ethereal endowments must be manifested to mankind.
All these, therefore, are melancholy
laughing-stocks. Next, here are honest and
well-intentioned persons, who, by a want of
tact--by inaccurate perceptions--by a distorting
imagination--have been kept continually at
cross-purposes with the world, and bewildered upon
the path of life. Let us see, if they can confine
themselves within the line of our procession. In
this class, likewise, we must assign places to
those who have encountered that worst of
ill-success, a higher fortune than their abilities
could vindicate; writers, actors, painters, the
pets of a day, but whose laurels wither unrenewed
amid their hoary hair; politicians, whom some
malicious contingency of affairs has thrust into
conspicuous station, where, while the world stands
gazing at them, the dreary consciousness of
imbecility makes them curse their birth-hour. To
such men, we give for a companion him whose rare
talents, which perhaps require a revolution for
their exercise, are buried in the tomb of sluggish
circumstances.

Not far
from these, we must find room for one
whose success has been of the wrong kind; the man
who should have lingered in the cloisters of a
university, digging new treasures out of the
Herculaneum of antique lore, diffusing depth and
accuracy of literature throughout his country, and
thus making for himself a great and quiet fame.
But the outward tendencies around him have proved
too powerful for his inward nature, and have drawn
him into the arena of political tumult, there to
contend at disadvantage, whether front to front,
or side by side, with the brawny giants of actual
life. He becomes, it may be, a name for brawling
parties to bandy to and fro, a legislator of the
Union; a governor of his native State; an
ambassador to the courts of kings or queens; and
the world may deem him a man of happy stars. But
not so the wise; and not so himself, when he looks
through his experience, and sighs to miss that
fitness, the one invaluable touch, which makes all
things true and real. So much achieved, yet how
abortive is his life! Whom shall we choose for
his companion? Some weak-framed blacksmith,
perhaps, whose delicacy of muscle might have
suited a tailor's shop-board better than the
anvil.

Shall we
bid the trumpet sound again; It is hardly
worth the while. There remain a few idle men of
fortune, tavern and grog-shop loungers, lazzaroni,
old bachelors, decaying maidens, and people of
crooked intellect or temper, all of whom may find
their like, or some tolerable approach to it, in
the plentiful diversity of our latter class.
There, too, as his ultimate destiny, must we rank
the dreamer, who, all his life long, has cherished
the idea that he was peculiarly apt for something,
but never could determine what it was; and there
the most unfortunate of men, whose purpose it has
been to enjoy life's pleasures, but to avoid a
manful struggle with its toil and sorrow. The
remainder, if any, may connect themselves with
whatever rank of the procession they shall find
best adapted to their tastes and consciences. The
worst possible fate would be, to remain behind,
shivering in the solitude of time, while all the
world is on the move towards eternity. Our
attempt to classify society is now complete. The
result may be anything but perfect; yet better--to
give it the very lowest praise--than the antique
rule of the herald's office, or the modern one of
the tax-gatherer, whereby the accidents and
superficial attributes, with which the real nature
of individuals has least to do, are acted upon
as the deepest characteristics of mankind. Our
task is done. Now let the grand procession move!

Hark! That
world-wide swell of solemn music, with
the clang of a mighty bell breaking forth through
its regulated uproar, announces his approach. He
comes; a severe, sedate, immovable, dark rider,
waving his truncheon of universal sway, as he
passes along the lengthened line, on the pale
horse of the Revelations. It is Death! Who else
could assume the guidance of a procession that
comprehends all humanity? And if some, among
these many millions, should deem themselves
classed amiss, yet let them take to their hearts
the comfortable truth, that Death levels us all
into one great brotherhood, and that another state
of being will surely rectify the wrong of this.
Then breathe thy wail upon the earth's wailing
wind, thou band of melancholy music, made up of
every sigh that the human heart, unsatisfied, has
uttered! There is yet triumph in thy tones. And
now we move! Beggars in their rags, and Kings
trailing the regal purple in the dust; the
Warrior's gleaming helmet; the Priest in his sable
robe; the hoary Grandsire, who has run life's
circle and come back to childhood; the ruddy
School-boy with his golden curls, frisking along
the march; the Artisan's stuff-jacket; the Noble's
star-decorated coat;--the whole presenting a
motley spectacle, yet with a dusky grandeur
brooding over it. Onward, onward, into that
dimness where the lights of Time, which have
blazed along the procession, are dickering in
their sockets! And whither? We know not; and
Death, hitherto our leader, deserts us by the
wayside, as the tramp of our innumerable footsteps
echoes beyond his sphere. He knows not, more than
we, our destined goal. But God, who made us,
knows, and will not leave us on our toilsome and
doubtful march, either to wander in infinite
uncertainty, or perish by the way!